Progressive Narcissism

The subject is Hillary Clinton as America’s foremost
left-wing politician. This is not an obvious idea to those leftists who
identify themselves as radicals. Purists of the creed are likely to regard both
Clintons as opportunists and sellouts of their cause. Hillary’s embrace of
Palestinian terrorism one day during her New York campaign for the Senate, and
her retreat under fire the next does not sit well with ideologues. But no
political purist ever won an election. Moreover, the left is not and has never
been a monolith, and its factions have always attacked each other almost as
ferociously as their political enemies.

It is possible to be a socialist, and radical in one’s
agendas, and moderate in the means one regards as practical to achieve them. To
change the world, it is necessary first to acquire power. Transitional goals
may be accomplished by stealth and deception even more effectively than by
frontal assault. Politics is never simple. A politics that appears too moderate
and compromised to radicals may present even greater dangers to the
unsuspecting. In 1917, Lenin’s political slogan was not “Socialist
Dictatorship, Firing Squads and Gulags!” It was “Bread, Land and Peace.”

Yet Hillary Clinton perceived as America’s first lady of the
left, is also not obvious to many conservatives. Since conservative politics is
really about the defense of America’s constitutional order, this is a far more
significant myopia. Underestimating the foe on any battlefield can be fatal;
the political battlefield is no exception.

The problem of perceiving Hillary is exemplified in a
brilliantly etched and elegantly deconstructed portrait of Mrs. Clinton by
former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. The focus of Noonan’s book, The
Case Against Hillary Clinton, is not Mrs. Clinton’s kitsch Marxism
or her perverse feminism or her cynical progressivism. It is her narcissism.
In this psychological nexus, Noonan finds the key to unlock Hillary’s public
persona. In Noonan’s analysis, it is almost as though Mrs. Clinton’s political
beliefs were merely instrumental to her career, and as changeable as her famous
hairstyles.

“Never has the admirable been so fully wedded to the
appalling,” Noonan writes of the subject and her faithless spouse. “Never in
modern political history has such tenacity and determination been marshaled to
achieve such puny purpose: the mere continuance of Them.”

The wit is razor sharp, but the point just wide of the mark.
There are many unprincipled narcissists in politics. But there has never been a
White House so thoroughly penetrated by the political minions of the left.
Noonan’s psychological characterization is surely correct. But if Hillary and
Bill Clinton were unable to draw on the dedication and support of this left –
if they were conservatives, for example -- there would be no prospect of a
continuance of Them.

Ever since abandoning the utopian illusions of the
progressive cause, I have been struck by how little the world outside the left
seems to actually understand it. How little those who have not been inside the
progressive mind are able to grasp the cynicism behind its idealistic mask or
the malice that drives its hypocritical passion for “social justice.”

No matter how great the crimes progressives commit, no
matter how terrible the futures they labor to create, no matter how devastating
the human catastrophes they leave behind, the world outside the faith seems
ready to forgive their “mistakes” and to grant them the grace of “good
intentions.”

It would be difficult to recall, for example, the number of
times I have been introduced on conservative platforms as “a former civil
rights worker and peace activist in the 1960s.” I have been described this way
despite having written a lengthy autobiography that exposes these
self-glorifying images of the left as so much political deceit. Like many New
Left leaders whom the young Mrs. Clinton once followed (and who are her
comrades today), I saw myself in the 1960s as a Marxist and a revolutionary.
What was idealistic about exploiting an issue like civil rights, for example,
to achieve the destruction of the social order that made civil rights possible?

New Left progressives like Hillary Clinton and Acting Deputy
Attorney General Bill Lann Lee were involved in supporting, or promoting, or
protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad like the
Vietcong and criminal radicals at home like the Black Panthers. We did this
then -- just as progressives still do now -- in the name of “social justice”
and a dialectical world-view that made this deception seem ethical and the
fantasy seem possible.

As Jamie Glazov, a student of the left, has observed in an
article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies
terrorist Kathy Soliah: “if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology
and hatred with a concern for the ‘poor’ and the ‘downtrodden,’ then there will
always be a ‘progressive’ milieu to support and defend you.” Huey Newton,
George Jackson, Angela Davis, Bernardine Dorhn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin
“Hurricane” Carter, Mumia Abu Jamal, H. Rap Brown, Rigoberta Menchu and
innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their
criminal careers.

There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were
civil rights and peace activists -- and that is certainly the way I would have
described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to an audience
that was not politically left. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my
former comrades refer to themselves and their pasts in similar settings today.

But they are lying. When they defend racial preferences now,
for example, a principle they denounced as “racist” and fought against as
“civil rights” activists then,even they must know it.

The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing
progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary
way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity, and often,
therefore, without realizing that they are. The necessity for lying arises
because it is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, if you were one of them, for example,
would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role as part of
humanity’s vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that
would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth they
could not “understand” and that would only servie to hold them back?

If you believed that others could understand your truth, you
would not think of yourself as part of a “vanguard.” You would no longer
inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite whose members alone can see the
light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody
could see the same horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would
already have happened and there would be no need for the army of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of
what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes
from. To see yourself as a redeemer. To feel anointed. To be among the elect. In
other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism of all.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their
socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in the
process. That is why they don’t care that their panaceas have caused more human
suffering than any injustice they have ever challenged. That is why they never
learn from their “mistakes,” why the continuance of Them is more important than
any truth.

If you were
active in the so-called “peace” movement or in the radical wing of the civil
rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you concede –
even long afterwards -- that no, you were never really a “peace activist,”
except in the sense that you were against America’s war. Why would you
draw attention to the fact that you didn’t oppose the Communists’ war, and were
happy when America’s enemies won?

What you were
really against was not war, but American “imperialism” and American capitalism.
What you truly hated was America’s democracy, which you knew to be a “sham”
because it was controlled by money in the end. That’s why you wanted to “Bring
The Troops Home.” Because if America’s troops came home, America would lose and
the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be another step
closer.

But you never
had the honesty – then or now -- to admit that. You told the lie then to gain
influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you
keep on telling the lie for the same reason.

Why would you
admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren’t really
committed to civil rights as Americans understand the meaning of the term – as
rights granted not to groups but to individuals, not by government but “by
their Creator”)? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution
that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the
autonomous person – both of which you despise.

Since America is
a democracy and the people endorse it, the left’s “progressive” agendas can
only be achieved by lying to the people. The unenlightened must be kept
ignorant until the revolution transforms them. The better world is only
reachable through deception of the people who need to be saved.

Despite the homage it pays to post-modernist
conceits, despite its belated and half-hearted display of anti-Communist
sentiment, today’s left is very much the ideological heir of the Stalinist
progressives who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who
remember themselves today as civil libertarians -- opponents of McCarthy and
victims of political witch-hunts. (Only the dialectical can even begin to
understand this logic.)

To appreciate the continuity of the Communist mentality in
the American left, consider how many cultural promotions of McCarthy’s victims
and how many academic apologies for Stalinist crimes are premised on the
Machiavellian calculations and Hegelian sophistries I have just described.

Naturally, today’s leftists are smart enough to distance
themselves from Soviet Communism. But the head of the Soviet Communist Party,
Nikita Khrushchev, was already a critic of Stalin forty years ago. Did his
concessions make him less of a Communist? Or more?

Conservative misunderstanding of the left is only in part a
product of the left’s own deceits. It also reflects the inability of
conservatives to understand the religious nature of the progressive faith and
the power of its redemptive idea. I’m sometimes asked by conservatives about
the continuing role and influence of the Communist Party, since they observe
quite correctly the pervasive presence of so many familiar totalitarian ideas
in the academic and political culture. How can there be a Marxist left -- even
a kitsch Marxist left -- without a Marxist party?

The short answer is that it was not the
Communist Party that made the left, but the (small ‘c’) communist Idea. It is
an idea as old as the Tower of Babel, that humanity can build its own highway
to Heaven. It is the idea of a return to the Earthly Paradise, the garden of
social harmony and justice. It is the idea that inspires Jewish radicals and
liberals of a Tikkun Olam, a healing of the cosmic order. It is the
Enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. And it is the siren song
of the serpent in Eden: “Eat of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,
and you shall be as God.”

The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them
– this is what creates the left, and makes the believers so righteous in their
beliefs. It did so long before Karl Marx. It is the vision of a redemptive
future that continues to inspire and animate them despite the still-fresh ruins
of their Communist past.

It is the same idea that is found in the Social Gospel that
impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park
Ridge, Illinois. And it is the same idea that she later encountered in the New
Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the
writings of the New Left editor of Tikkun magazine who introduced her to
the “politics of meaning” after she had become First Lady. It is the idea that
drives her comrades in the Children’s Defense Fund, the National Organization
for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and all the other progressive
causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.

For the self-anointed messiahs, the goal, “social justice,”
is not about rectifying particular wrongs, which would be practical and modest
-- and therefore conservative. Rather, their crusade is about rectifying
injustice in the very order of things. “Social Justice” for them is a world
reborn, in which prejudice and violence and inequalities no longer exist. It is
a world in which everyone is equally advantaged and lacks fundamentally
conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a
reconstruction of human nature and of the social order itself. Even though they
are too prudent and self-protective to name it anymore, the post-Communist left
still passionately believes in their totalitarian future.

But this new world that has never
existed, never will, while the attempt to reach it can only bring back the
gulags and graveyards we have come to know too well. The century has taught us,
to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic. But progressives have
failed to learn the lesson, to make the connection between their utopian ideals
and the destructive consequences that flow from them. The fall of Communism has
had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. Its
moral arrogance is not diminished.

No matter how opportunistically the left’s rhetoric has been
modified, no matter how generous the concessions it has made, the faithful
cannot give up the belief in their mission to the future.

Because the transformation they seek is still total, the
power they seek is total. No matter how many compromises they strike along the
way. The compromises are themselves integral to the strategy of their mission.
The transformation of the world requires the permanent entrenchment of the
saints in power. Therefore, everything is justified that serves to
achieve the continuance of Them.

In Peggy Noonan’s
psychological portrait one can trace the outlines of the progressive persona I
have just described. Noonan observes that the “liberalism” of the Clinton era
is very different from the liberalism of the past. Clinton-era liberalism is
manipulative and deceptive and not ultimately interested in what real people
think because “they might think the wrong thing.”

That is why, according to Noonan, Hillary Clinton’s famous
plan that would have socialized American health care was the work of a
progressive cabal that shrouded itself in secrecy to the point of illegality.
Noonan labels Clinton-era politics “command and control liberalism,” using a
phrase with a deliberately totalitarian ring. But, like so many conservatives I
have come to know, Noonan is finally too decent and too generous to fully
appreciate the pathology she is confronting.

She begins her inquiry by invoking Richard
Nixon’s comment that only two kinds of people run for high office in America,
“those who want to do big things and those who want to be big people.” She
identifies both Clintons as “very much, perhaps completely, the latter sort,”
and clinically examines their narcissism by way of unlocking the mystery of who
they really are.

Regarding the husband, Peggy Noonan is probably right. I do
not think of Bill Clinton as a leftist inspired by ideas of a socially just world,
or as having even a passing interest in the healing of cosmic orders. He is
more readily understood as a borderline socio-path. Fully absorbed in the
ambitions of self, Clinton is a political chameleon who assumes the coloration
of his environments and the constituencies on which his fortunes have come to
depend.

Hillary Clinton is not so slippery. Despite the cynicism she
shares with her husband, one can clearly observe an ideological spine that
creates political difficulties for her he would instinctively avoid. This is
not to deny the force of her personal ambitions, or the power of her
narcissistic regard. But these attitudes could also be expected in any member
of a self-appointed elite, especially one like the left, which is based on
moral election.

For this reason, it is difficult to separate the
narcissistic from the ideological in the psychology of the political
missionary. Do they advance the faith for its own sake, or because advancing
the faith leads to their canonization as saints? Do the Lenins of history
sacrifice normal life in order to achieve “big things” or because they crave
the adulation the achievement brings? It is probably impossible finally to
answer the question. But we can observe that the narcissism of Stalin --
ex-seminarian, Father of the Peoples and epic doer of revolutionary big deeds
-- makes the Clintons’ soap opera of self-love thin gruel to compare.

Despite their life-long collaboration,
Bill and Hillary are different political beings in the end. Indeed her marital
rages provoked by a partner whose adolescent lusts put their collective mission
at risk is probably a good measure of how different they are.

“In their way of thinking,” Noonan writes
of the Clintons, “America is an important place, but not a thing of primary
importance. America is the platform for the Clintons’ ambitions, not the focus
of them.” The implication is that if they were principled emissaries of a
political cause, the ambition to do big things for America would override all
others. Instead, they have focused on themselves and consequently have made the
American political landscape itself“a
lower and lesser thing.”

They have “behaved as though they are justified in using any
tactic in pursuit of their goals,” including illegality, deception, libel,
threats and “ruining the lives of perceived enemies …” They believe, she
continues, “they are justified in using any means to achieve their ends for a
simple and uncomplicated reason. It is that they are superior individuals whose
gifts and backgrounds entitle them to leadership.” They do it for themselves;
for the continuance of Them.

But the fact is that they all do it. The
missionaries of the big progressive causes, the Steinems, the Irelands, the
Michelmans, the Friedans, and Hillary Clinton herself all were willing to toss
their feminist movement and its principles overboard to give Bill Clinton a
pass on multiple sexual harassments and, in fact, a career of sexual predation
that reflects utter contempt for the female gender. Indeed, the Clinton-Lewinsky
defense that the feminists made possible can be regarded as feminism’s
Nazi-Soviet Pact. Their calculation was as simple as it was crude: If Clinton
was impeached and removed, Hillary would go too. But she was their link
to patronage and power, and they couldn’t contemplate losing that. Their
kind was finally in control, and the conservative enemies of their beautiful
future were not. There was nothing they wouldn’t do or sacrifice to keep it
that way.

Almost a decade earlier -- in the name of the very
principles they so casually betrayed for Clinton -- the same feminists had
organized the disgraceful public lynching of Clarence Thomas. Despite fiercely
proclaimed commitments to the racial victims of American injustice, they
launched a vicious campaign to destroy the reputation of an African American
jurist who had risen, reputation unblemished, from dirt-shack poverty in the
segregated south to the nation’s high courts. They did it knowingly, cynically,
with the intent to destroy him in his person, and to ruin his public career.

Has there ever been a more reprehensible witch-hunt in
American public life than the one organized by the feminist leaders who then
emerged as vocal defenders of the White House lecher? Was there ever a more
sordid betrayal of common decency than this collective defamation -- for which
no apology has been or ever will be given?

What was the sin Clarence Thomas committed to earn such
judgment? The allegation – that he had talked inappropriately ten years
previously to a female lawyer and made her uncomfortable -- appears laughable
in the post-Lewinsky climate of presidential gropings and borderline rapes that
the same feminists sanctioned for their political accomplice. Thomas’ real
crime, as everybody knew but was too intimidated by the hysteria to confirm at
the time, was his commitment to constitutional principles they hated. They
hated these principles because the Constitution was drafted with the explicit
idea of thwarting their socialist dreams – “a rage for paper money, for an
abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or any other improper or
wicked project” -- as James Madison wrote in Federalist #10.[1][5]

Peggy Noonan is right. The focus of
Hillary Clinton’s ambition is not her country. But it is not merely herself
either. It is also a place that does not exist. It is the vision of a world
that can only be realize when the Chosen accumulate enough power to destroy
this one.

That is why Hillary and Sid Blumenthal, her fawning New Left
Machiavelli, call their own political philosophy the politics of “The Third
Way.” This distinguishes their politics from the “triangulation” strategy that
Dick Morris used to resurrect Bill Clinton’s presidency. Morris guided Clinton,
in appropriating specific Republican policies towards a balanced budget and
welfare reform as a means of securing his re-election. Hillary Clinton was on
board for these policies, and in that sense is a triangulator herself. But
“triangulation” is too obviously tactical and too crass morally to define a
serious political philosophy. Above all, it fails to project the sense of
promise that intoxicates the imaginations of political progressives. That is
why Hillary and Sid call their politics “The Third Way.”

“The Third Way”
is a term familiar from the lexicon of the left with a long and dishonorable
pedigree. It is the most ornate panel in the tapestry of deception I described
in the beginning of this essay. In the 1930s, Nazis used “The Third Way” to
characterize their own brand of National Socialism as equidistant between the
“internationalist” socialism of the Soviet Union and the capitalism of the
West. Trotskyists used “The Third Way” as a term to distinguish their own
Marxism from Stalinism and capitalism. In the 1960s, New Leftists used “The
Third Way to define their politics as an independent socialism between the
Soviet gulag and the democracies of the West.

But as the
history of Nazism, Trotskyism and the New Left have shown, there is no “third
way.” There is the capitalist, democratic way based on private property and
individual rights – a way that leads to liberty and universal opportunity. And
there is the socialist way of group identities, group rights, a relentless
expansion of the political state, restricted liberty and diminished
opportunity. “The Third Way” is not a path to the future. It is just the
suspension between these two destinations – a holding pattern while the stigma
of leftist disasters recedes. It is a bad faith attempt on the part of people who
are incapable of giving up their socialist schemes to escape the taint of their
discredited past.

Is there a
practical difference in the modus operandi of Clinton narcissism and
Clinton messianism? I think there is, and it is the difference between “triangulation”
– a cynical compromise to hang onto power until the next election cycle, and
“The Third Way” – a cynical deception to ensure the permanence of Them.
It is the difference between the politics of getting what you can, and the
politics of acquiring power to change the world.

A capsule
illustration of these different political ambitions can be found in the book Primary
Colors, which describes, in thinly veiled fiction, Bill Clinton’s road to
the presidency in 1992. It is an admiring portrait not only of the candidate
but of the dedicated missionaries – the true believing staffers and the
long-suffering wife -- who serve Clinton’s political and personal agendas.

These
functionaries -- Harold Ickes and George Stephanopoulos are two examples -- serve
as the flak-catchers and “bimbo eruption”- controllers who clean up his
personal messes and shape his image for gullible publics. But they are also the
idealists who design his political message, and who enable him to succeed.

It is Primary
Colors’ insight into the minds of these missionaries that is striking. They
see Clinton quite clearly as a flawed and often repellent human being. They see
him as a lecher, a liar and a man who would destroy an innocent human being in
order to advance his own career (this is, in fact, the climactic drama of the
text). Yet through all the sordidness and lying, the personal ruthlessness and
disorder, the idealistic missionaries faithfully follow and serve their leader.

They do it not
because they are themselves corrupted and bought off through material rewards.
The prospect of material return or fame is not what drives them. Think only of
Ickes, personally betrayed and brutally cast aside by Clinton, who nonetheless
refused to turn on him, even after the betrayal. Instead, Ickes kept his own
counsel and protected Clinton, biding his time and waiting for Hillary to make
her move, then joined her staff to manage her Senate campaign.

The idealistic
missionaries in this true tale bite their tongues and betray their principles,
rather than betray him. They do so because in Bill Clinton they see a
necessary vehicle of their noble ambition and their chiliastic dreams. He, too,
cares about social justice, about poor people and blacks (or so he makes
them believe). They will serve him and lie for him and destroy for him, because
he is the vessel of their salvationist hopes. Because Bill Clinton can gain the
keys to the state, he is in their eyes the only prospect for advancing the
progressive cause. Therefore, they will sacrifice anything and everything to
make him succeed.

But Bill Clinton
is not like those who worship him, corrupting himself and others for a higher
cause. Unlike them, he betrays principles because he has none. He will even
betray his country, but without the slightest need to betray it for something
else – for an idea, a party, a cause. He is a narcissist who sacrifices
principle for power because his vision is so filled up with himself that he
cannot tell the difference.

But the
idealists who serve him -- the Stephanopoulos’s, the Ickes’s, the feminists,
the progressives and Hillary -- can tell the difference. Their
cyncism flows from the very perception they have of right and wrong. They do it
for noble ends. They do it for the progressive faith. They do it because they
see themselves as gods, as having the power -- through correct politics -- to
redeem the world. It is that terrifyingly exalted ambition that fuels
their spiritual arrogance and justifies their means.

And that is why they hate conservatives.
They hate you because you are killers of their dream. You are defenders of a
Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your “reactionary”
commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and
limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you
are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and
human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument
for acquiring personal wealth and stocking political war chests, but as both
means and end.

Conservatives
who think progressives are misinformed idealists will always be blind-sided by
the sheer malice of the left -- by the cynicism of those who pride themselves
on their principles; by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity; by
the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal; and by the ruthless
disregard for the well-being of the poor on the part of those who preen
themselves as their champions.

Conservatives
are surprised because they see progressives as merely misguided, when they are,
in fact, morally – and ontologically -- misdirected. They are the
messianists of a false religious faith. Since the redeemed future that
justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be
realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their
limitless passion for the continuance of Them.